Royal Mail: Reaching crisis point

Our story today on Royal Mail losing a vital contract with Amazon arrives with a great thud and terrible timing. There is a direct link between Royal Mail losing its second-largest customer, and another event due today – the likely announcement by the Communication Workers' Union of a national strike. That would follow months of regional stoppages which have left Himalayan backlogs in deliveries and a deepening sense that the postal service is undependable.

In an essay last month for the London Review of Books, a postal worker (sporting the splendid pseudonym Roy Mayall) attacked the prevailing assumption that mail volumes were dropping: "Bills and bank statements and official letters still arrive by post; plus there's all the new traffic generated by the internet: books and CDs ... DVDs and games ... clothes and gifts and other items ... bought at any time of the day or night, on a whim, with a credit card." Yet rival delivery companies are wooing away the biggest, most lucrative contracts.

On public display is the ebbing away of the UK's only universal mail-delivery service, a much-loved national institution and a publicly-owned utility to boot. This ought to be top of the political agenda, yet it has been notable by its absence during party-conference season. Peter Mandelson's attempt to flog a stake in Royal Mail failed this summer, which is irksome for David Cameron who would rather not grasp this particular poisoned chalice. Meanwhile, the Royal Mail management continues its long tradition of cutting investment and staff.

This situation cannot hold. Either the government pushes ahead with privatisation (which can probably only be done by the taxpayer shouldering the pension deficit of £9bn or so), or it admits what should have been obvious all along – that the Royal Mail is a public utility that should remain in public hands.

Business secretary Peter Mandelson can argue that he is only riding the deregulatory wave coming from Brussels – although he is doing so with great alacrity and relish. But there is something deeply troubling in a Labour government's persistent, wilful neglect of anything resembling the public realm. Many Royal Mail workers see what they do not just as a job, but as a service. In his LRB essay, the pseudonymous postal worker talked about "Granny Smith" the pet name for customers, "particularly every old lady who lives alone and for whom the mail service is a lifeline". At a recent staff meeting to discuss changes to Royal Mail's practices, a worker asked what this all meant for Granny Smith. "'Granny Smith is not important,' was the reply. 'Granny Smith doesn't matter any more.'"